1. Please remember you don't have to have a purpose to walk this Earth.
2. In eighth grade we worked on a French project together. It was the first time I went to your house, and the soaring mural on the wall awed me. Your brother was still there back then, but he hid away somewhere we didn't bother looking. I hated the sound of my voice next to yours (I was full of self-loathing back then, and I hope you never feel the same way about yourself). I don't remember what grade we got on the project, nor do I care any longer.
3. I will never be able to tell you the things I want to, and I will hide away the truth until it festers and rots and ceases to be a truth. This I will do to protect myself, to protect any concept of a meaningful "us." Please forgive me.
4. You are an indistinct ghost in my memories until that imprecise moment when you ignited a raging supernova of suppressed emotion. I have evidence of your existence neither you nor I remember, and I do not know whether I should cherish them more or less because of this.
5. There is a certain beauty to mathematics when you describe it. There is a breathless wonder to numbers, letters, Greek, an enumeration of formulae I will no longer remember in the decades to come.
6. The most generous estimate is 10%, and that is a risk I will never let myself take with you.
7. I don't remember what became of the trivial promises we threw at each other as naive freshmen in high school, when we still believed in things like happiness and hope, when we didn't know the future was an apple with a worm in the center.
8. In exactly four weeks I will be leaving you, and I do not know when we will see each other again. I will send you a gift on your birthday every year until you fade again into the ghost you once were, when we will have both moved on. I would not wish you ill, but I hope you feel the same melancholy I do at this prospect.
9. On my eighteenth birthday I slept over at your house, and I wish the divide between us hadn't been so immense.
2. In eighth grade we worked on a French project together. It was the first time I went to your house, and the soaring mural on the wall awed me. Your brother was still there back then, but he hid away somewhere we didn't bother looking. I hated the sound of my voice next to yours (I was full of self-loathing back then, and I hope you never feel the same way about yourself). I don't remember what grade we got on the project, nor do I care any longer.
3. I will never be able to tell you the things I want to, and I will hide away the truth until it festers and rots and ceases to be a truth. This I will do to protect myself, to protect any concept of a meaningful "us." Please forgive me.
4. You are an indistinct ghost in my memories until that imprecise moment when you ignited a raging supernova of suppressed emotion. I have evidence of your existence neither you nor I remember, and I do not know whether I should cherish them more or less because of this.
5. There is a certain beauty to mathematics when you describe it. There is a breathless wonder to numbers, letters, Greek, an enumeration of formulae I will no longer remember in the decades to come.
6. The most generous estimate is 10%, and that is a risk I will never let myself take with you.
7. I don't remember what became of the trivial promises we threw at each other as naive freshmen in high school, when we still believed in things like happiness and hope, when we didn't know the future was an apple with a worm in the center.
8. In exactly four weeks I will be leaving you, and I do not know when we will see each other again. I will send you a gift on your birthday every year until you fade again into the ghost you once were, when we will have both moved on. I would not wish you ill, but I hope you feel the same melancholy I do at this prospect.
9. On my eighteenth birthday I slept over at your house, and I wish the divide between us hadn't been so immense.
